[sonnym]

I am working on average size web applications, which simplifies things greatly, but I do not think your characterization of kernel development is correct.

The official kernel mirror on github[1] does not have any of these extraneous branches, and, unsurprisingly, makes good use of the tagging ability built into git.

In fact, the kernel developers prefer[2,3] that feature branches are always based on a known working state if possible, rather than some arbitrarily moving branch, be it called master or develop. That said, the master branch of the linux kernel is, by no means, relegated to only having merge commits from feature branches that correspond to releases.

1. https://github.com/torvalds/linux 2. http://lwn.net/Articles/328436/ 3. http://lwn.net/Articles/328438/